30 For 30: Admiral Fell Promises by Sun Kil Moon

I turn 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 7, I try to use words to talk about an album that makes me feel things I find it difficult to put into words.

In the midst of preparing for this series I was going through a deeply introspective time, thinking about all the writing I've done over the years. I talked about my motivation for writing in greater detail in the entry on Post Office, but I didn't mention the final puzzle piece that clicked into place and got me to truly understand why I write. The day I wrote the Post Office piece, I happened to read a new interview with Mark Kozelek, the man behind Sun Kil Moon and formerly of the band Red House Painters. In the interview (located here) he says the following: “I make music to process—because I have to, not for praise or accolades or reactions.” Maybe this unstoppable driving force to create—to have to create—is obvious to other creative people, but I had never been able to figure out why I do the things I do until reading that. It was like someone cleared away my ego, the part of me that thought I wrote to express myself to other people or to get people to notice me. No, I write to express myself—period, end of sentence.


This wasn't the first time Mark Kozelek's words had inspired me in some way. Growing up in Ohio with melancholia as a constant companion as he did, I suppose I have a connection to him for those reasons alone. But it's his music and his lyrics that have continually spoken to me on many levels since I came across him. Longtime readers of Whiskey Pie may remember this review, which is a little rough around the edges but the spirit and enthusiasm of a fan shines through some of the clumsy writing. In some ways I don't think I'll ever have that same revelatory experience with a new album from Kozelek. It's the difference between discovering a favorite new artist and simply hearing a great new album by an artist you're already deeply familiar with.


Yet—and let this “yet” be a loud, resounding thing that dispels the four-out-of-five-star review I gave it upon its 2010 release—I don't think Admiral Fell Promises has been challenged by anything else Mark Kozelek has done or will do. If you're the sort of person who judges a work by considering the artist's intent and how well you feel they accomplished this, I don't think you could find a fault in Admiral Fell Promises even if it's not your kind of music. He set out to make an album with just a nylon-stringed guitar and his voice, and he did it in his trademark beautiful/sad way. It's an act of bravery and simplicity as stunning, in different ways, as Nick Drake's Pink Moon.


This music speaks to me in a way I think I could only approach with my own writing by doing another novel. And in that form it would take far more words and be far less effective (probably) at doing the same thing. There are lyrics on Admiral Fell Promises that hit like a memory that stops you dead in your tracks because the feeling is still so strong. There are other lyrics that haunt my thoughts and daydreams like people I once truly loved but will never see again. In a world of fast movement, of constant touring and travel, of people who come in and out of his life, Mark Kozelek is obsessed with cataloging people, passing feelings, and places, trying to hold onto them by making them part of his music. In 'Third And Seneca' he sings:


From my view at 32^nd Street
Winter throws its snow down heavily
empty halls of friends who've come and gone
I'm awoken, rushed and dragged along




This cataloging of people, feelings, and places is also something I try to do with my writing, but he says it much better. I tend to get attached to certain places I've been, whether due to the memories I formed there or the people who were around, and to want to return to them, over and over, and have it all be the same. Since this is not really possible, I guess it's why I live so much of my life in books, records, movies, and the like. Their permanence is reassuring to me. So as much as I don't miss certain ex-girlfriends of mine, and the places we shared together, lyrics from the title track of the album still get to me by contextualizing the disintegration of a relationship inside memories of a thousand days shared together in a house while the writer, in the present, looks at a night sky that echoes the emotions:


A thousand days have passed in that house she and I were sharing
and I hate myself for it, but I've stopped caring
the Maryland sky tonight is black and blue and beautiful




Lest I just keep quoting lyrics from songs and giving myself chills in the process, I'll explain why this album means so much to me. It goes far beyond the fact that I love how it sounds and how it makes me feel. It goes beyond the way it's by turns beautiful and sad, and then both at the same time, and always—always—bittersweet. See, reading Kurt Vonnegut for the first time when I was fairly young felt like discovering my literary Grandpa. He was much older, like a Grandpa would be, but through literature he spoke to me on deep levels, teaching me about the world and about my place in it. To an extent, he helped me figure out who I was, and more crucially, why I was the way I was. I don't know that I have the kind of depression that requires medication, seeing as how a therapist I saw during college told me I didn't, despite my protests. But at least after reading Vonnegut when I was in junior high, I understood what the feelings I had every so often were all about, and how it meant I wasn't so much broken or damage as I was different.



Admiral Fell Promises, then, feels like my older self doing the same thing to my current self, helping me understand everything better. This older self is more mature and poetic than I am; it's seen and done more things. It's there to let me know that, while I will never be completely happy 100% of the time, I will learn the hard lesson that, while life is indeed bittersweet, the sweet wouldn't mean anything without the bitter.

Great Album Covers: April

The last two album covers by Sun Kil Moon can serve as signifiers for the focus of the lyrics inside. While last year's Admiral Fell Promises featured a hazy view from a window, hinting at that album's sense of being on-the-move and watching the world while not always becoming directly involved, 2008's April looks like a particularly artsy photo from an antiques store. Or, more likely, the nice lighting above the dinner table in someone's house.

Mark Kozelek's lyrics evoke those introspective, dramatic moments that occur when you're in a relationship or getting over one. In particular, the kind of realizations you have while unable to sleep and staring at the fancy lights in your dining room. You know, kind of like the cover of the album.

Even without all of that in mind, this is still a really lovely cover. I've used it as my desktop background at work for a couple years.

Sun Kil Moon- Admiral Fell Promises

Mark Kozelek is an artist who's output seems increasingly insular. Even as he may record reverential covers of other bands or surface from time to time with a fantastic studio album under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, in between he'll put out interchangeable live albums from his solo acoustic tours, printed in limited runs of CD and vinyl to cater to hardcore fans, collector/eBay seller types, or both. As he runs his own record label, Caldo Verde, it's easy to question his motivations: what better way to make money than to do cheap solo acoustic tours and gouge your audience for documents of said tours? Well, maybe I'm naïve, but I don't think Kozelek is that kind of guy. And even if he is, hey, we all need to make a living somehow.

But I was saying something about him being an insular artist, wasn't I? Ah yes. Admiral Fell Promises is his new studio album as Sun Kil Moon, and it is almost stubbornly removed from its era. I say “almost” because I don't think he's even aware of how strikingly bizarre it is to hear a solo acoustic album from a modern artist when the typical listener is ensconced in any number of maximalist music genres, made with all sorts of instruments, samples, loops, effects pedals, and various gew gaws. It's the opposite of Bob Dylan going electric, of Lou Reed releasing Metal Music Machine. It's an artist in 2010 saying, damn it, you are going to sit down and pay attention to my impressionistic, cinematic lyrics, my moody nocturnal voice, and most importantly, my intricate filigrees and plucks on this here nylon stringed guitar. You may prefer “introverted” or “solipsistic” to “insular”, but no one said all art had to be outward looking and cutting edge.

Admiral Fell Promises sounds and feels like a mix of the acoustic guitar epics of Roy Harper's Stormcock, the minimalist grace and melancholia of Nick Drake's Pink Moon, and Pat Metheny's acoustic and baritone guitar album, One Quiet Night. It also reminds me a lot of the acoustic based songs from the last Sun Kil Moon album, April. If that sounds like an obvious point of comparison, understand I mean it more in the sense of the imagery and atmosphere of the lyrics than the music. There's a dreamy, cinematic, often bittersweet romanticism to April that still stuns me. Kozelek has such a way with words in regards to memories of people and places, such that it has the power to make you feel nostalgic for things you haven't experienced, possibly things that no one has. This gift is still going strong here. A travelogue like 'Third And Seneca' perfectly encapsulates this, with juxtapositional wordplay like “blood orange L.A./blood red Arizona.”

With the addition of masterfully played acoustic guitar, these songs are transformed from rambling solo pieces during which the same chords are monotonously played over and over, to something artful and rewarding to spend time with. The intros, outros, fills, bridges, and “solos” of Admiral Fell Promises are easily among Kozelek's richest playing yet, never calling attention to themselves as artificial additions. Instead they are built into tracks as intrinsic things, like the change at 4:35 of 'The Leaning Tree' or the sudden flurry of activity around 2:46 of 'Australian Winter' that comes and goes like a nasty snow squall. Kozelek has never been a slouch when it comes to guitar. Songs For A Blue Guitar is really the place where he came into his own as an electric guitarist, but the track 'Si Paloma' from 2003's Ghosts Of The Great Highway demonstrated a keen ability for fancy acoustic fretwork, with its exotic Spanish character. Though his solo live albums may have also hinted at it, too, his acoustic prowess is the most astonishing thing about Admiral Fell Promises. In a lesser artist's hands, the guitar playing would be too showy and overwhelm the lyrics, or it would be too sparse to serve its dual role as both rhythmic and melodic backing. Yet every song on Admiral is expertly balanced between the two extremes. In fact, this is the sort of album you can put on at a fancy dinner party for background ambience OR use as a soothing companion when you're too depressed to get off the couch for most of the weekend, and it works equally well.

Though it's hard for me not to want another April with both Kozelek's solo acoustic side and his full band electric guitar stuff, it's also hard for me to deny the ethereal grace and depth of an album like Admiral Fell Promises. Yes, as a mood piece, it is sublime. But there is the problem with a release like this: much as I might enjoy it, its style and tone are too sustained and specific to make for a fully great album. You know, like, uhm, April was. Hmmmm...

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Red House Painters- Songs For A Blue Guitar

The history behind the last two albums by Red House Painters is at least as well known as the music. The band were dropped from indie stalwart 4AD before the release of Songs For A Blue Guitar. Depending on which story you believe, this was: A) because of its stylistic change toward longer tracks with guitar solos B) because of the band's problems with the U.S. branch of the company C) because it was, in all but name, a Mark Kozelek solo album. At any rate, the band's final album, Old Ramon, was held up in release hell for three years due to record label mergers and other business-side bureaucracy. Kozelek finally bought back the rights and it was released by Sub Pop. Though he would soon form his own record label to avoid any such issues, creative freedom or otherwise, it's interesting how unfettered and focused Kozelek sounds on both Old Ramon and Blue Guitar.

My task here is to dispense with the latter. Having no experience with Kozelek's work pre-Blue Guitar (in terms of Red House Painters's discography, I mean), it's impossible for me to speak to how it compares to his earlier work. Anyway, there's no reason to go into comparisons or speaking of developments toward or away from a certain style. Songs For A Blue Guitar is a rich, lengthy album in its own right and a full demonstration of everything that makes Kozelek's music, under whatever name, so great. Like most of his work under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, it's roughly divided between delicate, poetic musings about love and the past ('Have You Forgotten') and long, Neil Young/Velvet Underground-circa-Loaded classic-style rock with solos and all ('Make Like Paper', a transformative cover of Wings's 'Silly Love Songs'). On a side note, this album also points the way toward releases, under both Kozelek's own name and under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, focused on covering other artist's songs, since three of the tracks here are covers...but I digress.

Most of Songs For A Blue Guitar ultimately can be divided between the two aforementioned styles, but it isn't entirely binary. 'I Feel The Rain Fall', a mellow country rock tune, sounds like Creedence Clearwater Revival with less groove. A cover of Yes's 'Long Distance Runaround' careens into a sudden stop and raucous guitar outro that sounds way more like sludgy, metal-y 90s alt rock than it does 70s prog rock. 'Priest Alley Song' namechecks the band's first album and has an intricate acoustic guitar melody that beautifully blooms into a full band arrangement roughly halfway through. And another cover, this time of The Cars's 'All Mixed Up', allows Kozelek to let loose on vocals, with his plaintive cries of "alllll mixed up."

The music of the Red House Painters, like all of Kozelek's work, has the air of cult-ness about it. The very things that people love about this band, and by extension this album, are the very things that other people hate. "The songs are depressing and the album is overly long," the detractors say. "No, the songs are poetic and emotionally affecting, and cutting any of the material would either dull the impact of the rest or muddle its flow and atmosphere," the fans say. As a critic first and a fan second, it falls to me, then, not to defend the band/Kozelek's music but to help qualify Songs For A Blue Guitar. Well, judged against either the standards of other music or the parts of Kozelek's discography I'm familiar with, this album is excellent, and a good introduction to his work for its transformative covers, melancholic acoustic numbers, and crunchy guitar rock.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

My Favorite Albums Of The 00s (Part 2) & (Part 3)

Sorry for the lateness. As you'll see in the third video, I've been having all sorts of issues with my computer and Internet lately. Anyway, they're finally done. Should have a written review up tomorrow. And yes, from now on the videos won't be lists.

Album Of The Week: Sun Kil Moon- Ghosts Of The Great Highway

Though even he has admitted that Sun Kil Moon is mostly a continuation of what he was doing in the Red House Painters, it must be interesting to be Mark Kozelek, who has helmed two underground fave bands on top of doing "solo" stuff under his own name. I'm not sure there's ever going to be a time where the man gets his due, since his work resists easy categorization and by its nature appeals to a small audience. Labels like 'slowcore' and 'sadcore' were often applied to Red House Painters, but Kozelek's work often flits between singer/songwriter acoustic poetics and full bore guitar rock. The most recent album by Sun Kil Moon, April, ostensibly chooses one of these twi styles per song.

I really love April, but Ghosts Of The Great Highway feels like a more major work because it takes more chances. Most of the songs have their own "thing", whether it's the forceful, nearly-arena rock of 'Salvador Sanchez', the way 'Last Tide' neatly segues into 'Floating' on a mellow acoustic guitar wave, or 'Si Paloma', a surprising but welcome Latin tinged instrumental. Anchoring the album is the epic 'Duk Koo Kim', which is up there with Animal Collective's 'Visiting Friends' for the best "long, trance inducing song" of this decade. Any ham fisted, stoned teenager can noodle around for ten minutes or more, but it takes true genius to hold your attention for that amount of time, and I never get restless during this song. Moreover, I think the different version of 'Salvador Sanchez' under the title 'Pancho Villa' is a neat way to end the album, giving it a cyclical feel.

If there's a weakness to Ghosts Of The Great Highway, it's that I don't find Kozelek's lyrics very consistent. Maybe that seems like a stupid statement since I just got done saying how varied the album is, but personally I don't find the boxing references compelling, even if they may be extended metaphors for something or other. I'm not saying the lyrics on Ghosts Of The Great Highway are bad, just that they sometimes seem a bit less personal and poetic than usual. Well, if Charles Bukowski had his horse racing and Hemingway had his bullfighting, I guess Kozelek can have his boxing. Still, 'Gentle Moon' strikes me as a bit cliched (and I say that as someone who's written his fair share of poems about cliched subjects), and 'Lily And Parrots' has the groaner "you are my love/I hold you above/everything and everyone."

Issues with some of the lyrics aside, Ghosts Of The Great Highway is a great album which proved that even after the Red House Painters, Kozelek had more to say and more things to try. Listening to this album and April just makes me wish he'd make another Sun Kil Moon album instead of all the solo acoustic stuff he keeps putting out.

The Best Albums of 2008 Part 2

8) Stephen Malkmus- Real Emotional Trash
Call me a super fan. Say that I have a man-crush on Stephen Malkmus. Whatever. Much as I love Pavement and wish Malkmus would get the boys back together, I'm not a fool. Those days are gone and Malkmus is wisely following his own muse from album to album. Real Emotional Trash takes Malkmus's flirtations with guitar heroics and the jam scene to its inevitable conclusion, adding ex-Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss to level out the bottom end. The result is less Phish or the extended moments of Led Zepplin than it is the Malkmus-ian aesthetic we've come to love but with even more emphasis on guitar-led improvisation than Pig Lib. The lengthy title track was one of this year's best joyrides.

7) Bon Iver- For Emma, Forever Ago
I think I said it best in my review: "It's always easy for me to forget albums like this when I'm discussing my 'best of the year' lists with the other music nerds and obsessives. These kinds of records, well, they don't change the world, create new genres, or instantly make scenes and sound-alikes sprout up in their wake. No, For Emma, Forever Ago is a familiar but fantastic pleasure, like spending a day off with a pot of tea, a new novel, and a rainstorm. The environment is well known but the novel is not. So it is with this album. It's one of the 2008's best (though technically it was self-released in 2007, so...) and a low key, strongly human piece of loss, pain, and recovery."

6) Portishead- Third
While I mostly fixated on the "comeback of the year!!" aspect of this release, one thing that's been sticking in the back of my mind has finally come out. Third reminded me of why I love electronic music. If accused of favoring rock above all other forms of music, I would concede the point. But albums like Third drop into my lap like a needy cat and whaddya know, I love electronic music, too. Using the tried and true "drum/synth loops with a vocalist" style as set in stone during the trip hop era, Third takes everything in a darker, more overtly synthetic direction while still remaining true to the band's feel and way with a song. Darker, more dissonant...it's like the soundtrack to Children of Men.

5) Wolf Parade- At Mount Zoomer
I wrote a really clumsy, music critic navel gazing kind of review for this album, but I think my point still stands: this album is every bit as good as their debut if you give it enough time. At Mount Zoomer seemed to be a pretty divisive release and while I fully understand why, I still think it's great if taken on its own terms. It doesn't have any songs as immediately stunning and memorable as 'I'll Believe In Anything', but it's got more variety and takes more chances. That counts for something in my book.

4) Sun Kil Moon- April
Had I ever listened to a Red House Painters or Sun Kil Moon (or even a Mark Kozelek solo release) album before April, I'm not sure I would have thought this album was so good. Maybe it was his worst release?? Well, having now gone back and picked up a good deal of Kozelek's work under those various monikers, I can safely say that April is still one of my favorites of the year. There's just something about his voice, his way with words, and the Neil Young-esque combination of skeletal acoustic ballads and extended guitar rockers that I can't get enough of. That the album is so long and I don't get bored halfway through speaks to its quality.

3) TV On The Radio- Dear Science
If Return To Cookie Mountain was the breakout release that Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes should have been, then Dear Science firmly entrenches TV On The Radio in the upper echelons of the indie rock world. The album is poppier, more polished, and more accessible than previous releases yet none of these are knocks against it. If anything, TV On The Radio have improved their way with vocals and their trademark hard-to-describe production, mixing hip hop, electronic, experimental, jazz, and indie rock textures, melodies, and rhythms into a magnificent soup. There's something quintessentially American about the band, at least the "classless, colorless" America that I hold as an ideal; between these guys and Barack Obama winning the election, this suburban white boy is happy to see that this country isn't as racist, conservative, and racially divisive as I thought.

2) Deerhunter- Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
Yes, I haven't reviewed the "bonus album" that comes with Microcastle. But that doesn't change the fact that Microcastle itself is an incredible achievement for the band. As with the above TV On The Radio release, it polished and opened up the band's pop influences while still being very Deerhunter-y. Were I a lazy critic, I would say that all the pop songs ended up on the album while all the psychedelic/shoegazer stuff ended up on Weird Era Cont. But that's not entirely true. Weird Era Cont. is more like a midway point between Cryptograms and Microcastle. But I digress. As a one-two punch, the twin release from Deerhunter is brilliant noise pop and 2008's best bang-for-the-buck.

1) Fleet Foxes- Fleet Foxes (and the Sun Giant EP)
While Deerhunter officially paired their two releases from this year, the Fleet Foxes indirectly paired their EP with the self titled debut. As good as Sun Giant is, it can't help but feel like an appetizer for the album. I'm trying to keep my hyperbole in check here, but Fleet Foxes is the most fully formed and brilliant debut in recent memory. We're talking Surfer Rosa "fully formed and brilliant debut" territory here. If this were 2003 or 2004, Fleet Foxes would have been lumped in with the psych-folk movement. As it is, the band's phenomenally gorgeous vocal harmonies (here comes the Beach Boys comparison...!!) recall the old masters the Beach Boys while their music gathers from old Americana staples like folk and country as well as the tried and true classic rock and singer/songwriter soundscapes. Yet for as many reference points as you might have for the band, it doesn't change the fact that these songs are good beyond description. Well, there's that hyperbole sneaking in. So: album of the year. The end.

Album of the Week: Sun Kil Moon- April

I spent a good deal of my early romance with music seeking out very specific kinds of music. I had a certain sound or style that I heard in my head and I couldn't rest until I found a band like it. But now that I've been listening to music "seriously" for a decade, I find myself more open to letting things come to me as they will. I go to the library and get an album by so-and-so because the name sounds familiar from a review or recommendation of a friend. Or I buy an album I know almost nothing about based on the cover or the group's name or the record label or something else, so I experience it with little or no expectations. And in this process of equally seeking out music as I let it discover me, I often find that I'm experiencing and enjoying music I never knew I wanted or never thought I would enjoy.

Sun Kil Moon is a band that I never thought I would enjoy because, on paper, there's nothing special going on. It's very deliberate music, existing in that sadcore/slowcore sub-sub-genre between indie rock and folk/singer/songwriter, recalling both the introspective rock of the third Velvet Underground album and the sad-but-not-depressing folk of Nick Drake. I love this style of music but I find it hard to get excited about. It's kind of like how the other day at the library I got the new Indiana Jones movie and Gus Van Sant's Gerry, one a fun action movie and the other a meditative, naturalistic film where two guys wander through beautiful southwestern/western scenery for what feels like two hours and not much happens. I would say that I enjoyed Indiana Jones more, whatever 'enjoyed' means in this context, but I found Gerry much more rewarding. There's more to think about with it; more new experiences; more to remember. This is exactly how I feel about April: it's not an album I expect to force on other people and I'll probably never cherrypick songs from it for mix tapes. Yet listening to it for almost a month now, off and on, I find it so much more rewarding and meaningful than most of the music I've heard this year.

April contains the kind of music you have to give yourself over to completely. It's made for overcast gray afternoons when you're too tired, bored, or depressed to get up, so you just lay on the floor or couch with the album on repeat. The songs sketch amazingly cinematic scenes of lonely introspection or dreamlike love. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these songs are like short stories or films, succinct but full of rich, imaginative detail. And again I will admit that, on paper, April doesn't look appealing because the songs are long and the album goes on for 77-some minutes. But once you're in the sweep of the thing, it's irresistible. Though April sounds nothing like them, its songs have the same peculiar ability that 'Like A Rolling Stone', 'Stairway To Heaven', and 'Bohemian Rhapsody' have, to be long but never feel long, to never overstay their welcome. Sure, they're repetitive, but ask any fan of electronic music about repetition: there's good repetition and then there's bad repetition. What, to one listener, seems boring will seem hypnotic and entrancing to another.

What makes the album so good, then?? Well, there are astonishing moments of pure delight on April. 'Tonight In Bilbao' chimes along for eight minutes before the song switches a gear for the last minute-and-a-half with a delicately plucked guitar melody. The album opens strongly with 'Lost Verses', which sounds a bit like Led Zeppelin's 'That's The Way', letting you know right away what a gorgeous, singular voice Mark Kozelek has...and then the full on guitar jam kicks in. 'Like The River', a duet with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, is every bit as lovely as you might imagine. 'Tonight The Sky' splits the difference between Neil Young's 'Down By The River' and The Velvet Underground's 'Some Kinda Love', particularly the lengthy guitar workouts of the live versions of both. And 'Heron Blue' has beautiful acoustic guitar solos that remind one of classical music.

Certain music can hold you transfixed, unable or at least unwilling to turn it off until it's finished. This is the kind of power April has over me. I listen to a lot of music and a lot of different music, so it takes something really special to stick with me for as long as this album has. I have to confess that normally after I write a review of something I move onto something else right away. But I still want to listen to this album some more. It's the sort of sleeper release that'll show up on end-of-the-year 'best of' lists but still won't get the attention and sales it deserves just by its very nature. You'll see it stocked at Best Buy or your local record store and vaguely recall reading something about it but you'll put it back in favor of something else. Maybe you'll get around to it in a few months. Or a few years. Sun Kil Moon, and Mark Kozelek's work in general, is the kind of stuff you can spend a lifetime putting off in favor of other things. But whenever you manage it, April will be waiting for you, ready to hold you in its spell.

Video: Sun Kil Moon- Last Tide

Nine times out of ten, fan made videos on YouTube are garbage. Even the ones made for Garbage songs are garbage. But every so often I find one that actually works, says something on its own while also saying something about the music, too.

This fan made video for 'Last Tide' by Sun Kil Moon does that. Even though it ends abruptly it perfectly captures what I feel and see in my head when I hear this song, and the music of Sun Kil Moon in general. I've been meaning to write a review of April by this band for a few weeks now. I feel like this is the final impetus to do it.
p.s. The blog by the guy who made this video is amazing, too.